September 12, 2009. We awoke in Bryce Canyon, Utah, and drove furiously south to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to make the sunset and our campground reservation. It’s always painful to have to move through such beautiful country so quickly, but the pain was slightly eased by the Fat Tire we were able to purchase just across the Arizona border, which tasted even better than usual after a […]

We’ve made big progress on the kitchen front: we have new maple cabinets, working water shut-0ff valves, a working and installed microwave, stove, and refrigerator. We’ve made minimal progress selling our Merit 25 sailboat. We feel … closer. But having your entire kitchen vomited into the rest of your home certainly doesn’t make it LOOK like you’re closer to moving. Mentally, I think we’re starting to fatigue. It’s a […]

You’ve probably heard that we love craigslist. Love it. We’ve bought and sold a bunch of stuff on craigslist over the years. But sometimes what we’re selling has no value. And not only that, sometimes our stuff is such a liability that giving it away for free is a great deal. Hear me out. We’re remodeling out kitchen. There are existing cabinets that we no longer need screwed into and […]

I love finding inspirational confirmation of what we’re trying to do. Today was on bootsnall.com: 11 Reasons to Stop Dreaming and Start Planning Your Round the World Trip. My favorites: #1 — You are only going to get older #5 — You can be free from all your crap (still an issue for us) photo credit: Aric McKeown | Packed.

Things seem to be picking up in Chicago’s real estate market. There are a bunch of condos listed as ‘under contract’ on Baird & Warner’s website. That’s good news for us — we want a quick sale when we finally list. But there are still a lot of units for sale. We know we’ll be at the bottom-end of the cost spectrum, but we’re still not sure what price we’ll […]

We’ve been brainstorming vehicles for a while. First, we thought we’d do a truck or SUV, then a minivan, now we’re thinking Dodge Sprinter. We have four criteria — MPG, space, handling, and cost. We don’t want a car that gets 11 MPG, we need enough room for a bed and all our stuff, we don’t want to drive a beastly bus, and we have a limited budget. But what […]

Funny — I almost typed ‘Our New Kitchen’ as the headline. It ain’t ours. It’s the buyer’s kitchen, and it’s going to take 6-8 weeks to be ready. The cabinets are ordered. The remaining details are TBD, but the cabinets are the long pole in the tent, the limiting reagent, the … caravan’s wheelbarrow. We’ll figure the rest out shortly — counter, sink, faucet, etc. The kitchen is our last […]

Last weekend we were tearing apart the storage closet – trying to make sense of piles of scrap wood, boxes upon boxes of screws and nails, gardening supplies, miscellaneous sporting goods, and other junk that hadn’t been touched in years – when I came across an old portfolio. I brought it upstairs to see if I could finally bear to part with some of my adolescent artwork. Flipping through the […]

We have things figured out, more-or-less, financially. We know basically what we want to do, what we’ll pack, what we’ll drive, where we’ll go. We know how we’ll sleep, find bathrooms, crash with friends, and eat. We still don’t know IF we’ll be able to make it happen. The big brontosaurus in the room is the room — the condo. We need to sell it. We still have the kitchen […]